Blockchain Economics and Digital Assets

Queen Mary, University of London · 2025/2026 Module lead: Dr Daniele Bianchi

This repository holds the LaTeX sources, compiled PDFs, and RAG chunk file for ECOM215.

Course materials

Week	Lecture slides	Notes	Tutorial
1	Foundations of Blockchain Technology	Notes	—
2	Blockchain Economics	Notes	Tutorial
3	Smart Contracts & DApps	Notes	Tutorial
4	Decentralised Finance (DeFi)	Notes	Tutorial
5	Stablecoins & CBDCs	Notes	Tutorial
6	Digital Ownership & Tokenization	Notes	Tutorial
7	Cryptocurrencies as an Asset Class (I)	Notes	Tutorial
8	Cryptocurrencies as an Asset Class (II)	Notes	Tutorial
9	Blockchain in Traditional Finance	Notes	Tutorial

Rebuild the PDFs from source with:

cd Lectures  && latexmk -pdf *.tex
cd ../Notes  && latexmk -pdf *.tex
cd ../Tutorials && latexmk -pdf *.tex

Chat widget content

The chat widget is backed by course-chunks.json, a retrieval index over the course material. Chunks are split on \section / \subsection boundaries in the LaTeX sources, and each chunk carries both the cleaned LaTeX text and the corresponding text extracted from the compiled PDF.

Rebuild the chunk file after editing any source:

python3 scripts/build_chunks.py

This writes course-chunks.json in the repo root. Requirements: Python 3.9+ and pdftotext on $PATH (installed with Poppler or MacTeX).

Layout

ECOM215/
├── README.md                 # this file
├── course-chunks.json        # generated RAG index
├── scripts/
│   └── build_chunks.py       # chunker: .tex + pdftotext → chunks
├── Lectures/                 # Week 0–9 Beamer slides + Figures/
├── Notes/                    # Week 1–9 article-class notes
└── Tutorials/                # Week 2–9 TA-copy tutorial handouts